The sound of an air conditioner compressor coming on or shutting off has a melancholy echo that I still associate with the slow death of Bobby Housemann’s mother. Until then, no one on Delphine Street had an air conditioner. The first unit was installed in Housemann’s front bedroom when Bobby’s mother came home from the hospital in June of 1952. Bobby and I both were fourteen years old, and the Housemanns lived almost directly across the street from us. All that summer, until Mrs. Housemann died in August, the on and off cycle of that air conditioner was a background reminder to everyone on the street of what was happening up in that front bedroom.
Throughout that summer, Bobby Housemann never said a word about his mother’s condition, and after her death, he didn’t indicate in any outward way that anything significant had occurred in his life. Whatever Bobby felt, he kept to himself. Looking back, I don’t think that the Housemanns were unfeeling people. They simply were not demonstrative people. My father once characterized Mr. Housemann, Bobby’s father, as the most inarticulate man he had ever met. Mr. Housemann’s first name was Robert, the same as his son’s, but he answered to the name “Barney.” Nobody seemed to know where that one had come from.
When Mrs. Housemann died, my mother took on the door-to-door collection for the funeral flowers from the neighbors. She let herself remain annoyed over the lack of any response or acknowledgement from the Housemann family. Barney Housemann was a fireplug of a man who worked nights on the auto parts assembly line at Hennings Manufacturing on Front Street. The only things I ever knew about him was that he liked listening to the Phillies on the radio, and later watching the games on TV, that he kept a cigar lit almost all the time, and that he drank two cases of Essingler beer every week.
Nicknames like Mr. Housemann’s “Barney” were still part of the neighborhood culture. If a nickname hit you and stuck, that was it. It was yours for life. Bobby Housemann was casually handed the name “Yankel” by of all people, my father. My father later told me he had picked up the name from a newspaper ad for a production of a local Yiddish theater company. The name just seemed to fit. “Bobby Yankel” morphed into “Bobby Yanks,” and then just “Yanks,” the name that would still be used today if Bobby ever happened to come up in conversation.
The summer we were ten years old, Bobby and I shared our first cigarettes together. “You got em,” I asked. He had taken two Chesterfields belonging to one of his older sisters. I had the matches. Behind the billboards on the Farmer’s Market parking lot, we fired up. With his first drag, Bobby went into spasms of coughing. I took a long inhale and remember a feeling of almost psychedelic dizziness, a sense that I was ascending weightless into the cloudless blue of the sky. That morning must have cured Bobby, he never took up smoking. Two years later, I was headed into a pack a day plus habit that I didn’t break for another twenty-seven years.
One muggy afternoon in that same summer of 1948, I was one of a group of kids and some grown-ups standing across the street in front of Housemann’s house. Mr. Lynch had said something about events occurring during the “last war.” Despite the fact that World War Two had ended just three years earlier, use of the phrase “the last war,” was still generally understood to mean the First World War. The conversation was probably spurred by the presence in Philadelphia that year of the biggest veterans’ shindig ever held, the 1948 American Legion’s Forty and Eight Convention celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the end of the First World War.
Without a word, Mr. Housemann left us and went inside their house. He came out minutes later with a display board about three feet on each side. It was covered in green felt and mounted with the war souvenirs his uncle had brought home in 1918. There were uniform buttons and medals and even a defused German wooden-handled “potato masher” grenade. What caught my attention was a soft, brimless German Army cap in field gray wool. I remember touching the wool and getting a shiver. There was a small red-white and black roundel button on the front center of the cap. I think I began to understand that a German soldier, a real German soldier, by then either long dead, or at least to me, a very old man, had once worn this ancient, foreign-looking hat on his head. In that moment, a kind of a different sense of the reality of the First World War first began to work its way into my consciousness.
Before that little epiphany, there had been a Memorial Day parade. On that holiday, a soft morning in late May, I heard the sound of drums from somewhere up on Fifth Street. Being eight or nine years old, I raced off to find the source. A block or two away, a contingent of veterans, a color guard followed by a local drum and bugle corps, was going around the neighborhood placing wreaths at the various war memorials. The ceremonies ended in the graveyard of an Episcopal church on the other side of Mascher Street with the playing of taps and the firing of blanks over the headstones. I joined the other kids in scrambling for the empty brass cartridges. The men firing over the graves that day were First World War veterans from the local American Legion Post. The only thing I knew then about the American Legion was the smell of spilled beer that drifted from their dumpy building on Fifth Street. That Memorial Day morning, most of those ex-doughboys were probably under fifty years of age, twenty or more years younger than I am now.
There were other moments, unrecognized at the time, but each of which has its assigned place in my own version of the War To End All Wars. We now know the November holiday as Veteran’s Day, a kind of a sanitized non-denominational memorial to the armed forces. It’s a national holiday, a day off that’s calculated in terms of the appropriate weekend in November. But not all that long ago, it was Armistice Day, and it fell precisely on the eleventh of November, the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month. On that day, at the exact moment in the morning, in our then mixed industrial/residential neighborhood, factory whistles sounded to mark the moment of the now nearly forgotten 1918 cease-fire. Men would stop on the street, remove their hats and observe a moment of silence.
In the newspaper photographs of the big 1948 American Legion convention parade, there were shots of at least two or three open cars filled with G.A.R. members. The Grand Army of the Republic was the turn of the century consolidation and reconciliation of the veterans’ organizations from both sides in the Civil War. Almost all of the frail, white-bearded, big-hatted men in the touring cars were by then over 100 years old, the last of the living veterans of the Civil War.
Bobby Housemann and I were only three months apart in age. My birthday was in September and his was in December. Because we lived across the street from each other and were in the same class at school, we found ourselves always thrown together. But we were never a good match. The relationship was, from its beginnings, an unequal one. When we moved in and I discovered that there was a kid my own age almost directly across the street, I just assumed that we would be friends. To me, Bobby seemed to be a self-contained and an unselfconsciously confident person. I wasn’t, and he probably wasn’t either. I simply wanted Bobby Housemann to be my friend, and Bobby really didn’t care if I was his friend or not. It wasn’t that Bobby didn’t like me, or that he had decided to brush me off, he just didn’t seem to need me as a friend.
We walked to and from the Incarnation parish school together every day. When we became Cub Scouts, it was Bobby’s mother who was our Den Mother. Later, and for a lot of reasons I still don’t understand, I opted not to attend the free diocesan high school and along with three of my elementary school mates, chose instead to attend a private high school. Bobby was one of those three. The nature of the relationship between Bobby and I can be best illustrated by the fact that it was me who every morning knocked on his door and not the other way around.
Unless you’re unusually gifted, graced, or talented, a comparative life at best can become a source of anxiety, and worse, one of humiliation and shame. I knew early on that it really didn’t have much to do with Bobby and had everything to do with me. It wasn’t that he and I didn’t share some good times growing up together. It was that I wanted and needed more and he didn’t.
Bobby offered me a continuing education in the inexplicable vagaries of life. As a one hundred and fourteen-pound high school freshman, I vowed, like the ninety-seven pound weaklings in the Charles Atlas ads in the comic books, to take charge of my own physical future. No more psychic sand, real or imagined, would be kicked in my eyes. An unused set of barbells, belonging to a cousin, came my way, and throughout the winter and early spring of my fifteenth year, I spent my evenings in the cellar pumping iron, often working out between lines of drying laundry. Coincidentally, I did spring up a couple of inches and put on a solid twenty pounds. When the first warm days arrived, I emerged ready to strut my stuff and to graciously acknowledge the admiration from those privileged to behold the new me. Not a word. No one seemed to notice the fruits of my disciplined labors. As another of my cousins once noted, “you know, the men in our family really don’t seem to be able to develop defined muscles.” Worse yet, over the same winter, Bobby Yanks got taller than me and put on about thirty pounds of perfectly cut muscle tone. I was devastated. But that wasn’t the end of it.
Neither my father nor Mr. Housemann owned a car. But on Bobby’s sixteenth birthday, he passed his driver’s test. Two days later, he drove up our street in his own car. Not just any car, but the very car I had dreamed of, had lusted for, a 1940 Ford convertible, a car that has come to virtually define street rod chic. How could this be happening? The muscles and the car that were the kinds of props I had deemed essential to my starring role in my own life. How had they been so cruelly usurped by the kid across the street? What a gyp life was turning out to be. Taking it personally, I seethed. I was at least smart enough to put on a good face and keep my disappointments to myself.
As an adult, I came to know that I did owe Bobby Yanks one thing at least. With a few exceptions, I’ve managed to avoid accepting the terms of any further unequal relationships, including those where I might have been the dominant partner. Either way, no thanks.
Halfway through our junior year of high school, Bobby Yanks became involved with a girl from the next street over and kind of dropped out of sight. A few months later, my father bought his first car, a year-old Ford, and I got my own driver’s license. I had continued to make new friends, and had begun my moves up the ladder into the higher realms of elite corner lounging. Soon, I too was to meet a girl and change the direction of my life. Bobby and I would still stop and go through the usual “How ya doin?” and “What’s happening?” And on several occasions, it was he who would cross the street from his house to come over to our steps and start a conversation.
Tags: 1940 ford, 1945-1955, american legion. forty and eight, aristice day, charles atlas, chesterfields, civil war, cub scouts, esslinger beer, g.a.r., memoir, olney, philadelphia, phillies, ww I
September 10, 2009 at 6:59 pm |
Hi! I was surfing and found your blog post… nice! I love your blog.
Cheers! Sandra. R.